


Live Through This

by Aloice



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, F/M, Future Fic, Gen, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2011-06-10
Updated: 2011-06-12
Packaged: 2017-10-20 07:08:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 7,238
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/210077
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aloice/pseuds/Aloice
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Three years after the Game, Dave is doing parkour and Jade is surrounding herself with the bitter memories of one very long day.</p><p>High School AU, mostly Dave/Jade with a little bit of John/Rose. Karkat and Terezi are there and not there.</p><p>Seriously, just please give it a try and hopefully comment. XD</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Distraction

Your name is Dave Strider, and ever since you lost the ability to flashstep (Cal. Screw Cal), you have loved parkour.

Leaps, vaults, flips and tic-tacs: the city is yours, and you're not afraid to venture into its depths. You like to say that you have a fucking appointment with Houston every five o'clock in the morning and she's very possibly the best thing that has ever happened to you – she never asks anything but gives you everything you could ever want. She never stops, she never talks, she stores enough secrets for you to never feel bored and she's complex enough to be your equal. Huge and cynical, she has her dark places of danger and solitary misery… all heat and intensity, just like you. (Much better than Egbert's neighborhood, he calls it peaceful but it's just a shithole in which absolutely nothing has ever happened.) A heart like yours absolutely demands a badass metropolitan area to be your best mate, and behold, you get what you want.

It's late May, and the sun hangs somewhere on the horizon, obscured by the omnipresent photochemical smog. You kick open the front door of your apartment building for the twenty sixth time this month, feeling the vibration of the metal in your bones as it shudders and gives away. (It probably won't last much longer, but you don't care, because you know no one does.) The sick beats ring in your years like a jet takeoff, but that's fine since they are always constructive interference to you. They keep you going in your own world.

"Strider, off again?"

You ignore the guy. He shrugs, turning away as if he didn't expect a response anyway. "Strider, just so you know, Tranquility Park is tryin' to recruit you. Been here a few times, huntin' you down I suppose. I gotta say, though, that they don't look half bad. Y'all woulda be awesome."

You ignore him again. He smiles cockily and picks up his cheap newspaper, walking into the apartment building without sparing you a second glance.

The streets have filled up more rapidly than usual today, all the Chevrolets and Toyotas groaning on the highway as if it will never end. You stop on your tracks and study them, imagining picking your path through them while rapping sick rhymes at the highest possible volume. Your Bro could have done it, but he probably would have rolled his eyes and said that for his almighty echelons it's nowhere near ironic enough.

Bro…

If you are still the same Dave Strider from three years ago, you probably would have mourned the fact that you have come up with an idea that is so inferior to his ironic standards. Now, though, you just purse your lips until they're almost invisible and run on, trusting the fluid movements to sweep you away. The sky is high and obstacles abundant (too abundant for an observant eye, really); it's just up to you to clear every last annoying hindrance from your path and keep going.

Although the shades were a pain to keep on during freerunning sessions, you have configured it (it cost you three hours) to your comfort. Your eyes would probably never successfully adjust to a shadeless environment anyway; you have kept the shades on for too long, and you wouldn't see that cracks in the walls if your eyes were naked under the glare of the Houstonian sun. You run and roll quickly and sweetly, never fazed and never hesitant, never looking down and never looking back – even for the sake of safety.

It's near six o'clock when you complete a particularly challenging jump. You have performed the roll with all the finesse that you can master, but it still isn't perfect and you know it. Your joints are aching mildly, and in the back of your mind you suspect you might have bruised something. Parkour in real life, you have learned without surprise, is never as effortless and glorious as it looks on tape; although you have had plenty of practice, you still don't possess a perfect record. (You wonder if anyone does.)

You check the ankles and the arms: uh-huh, a little damaged but they should be fine by tomorrow. Your forehead has become a little damp from the running, so you sit for a while and rub the sweat beads away from your temple. You look up at the sun; yes, it would probably be good to start heading back. You already have far more tardies than necessary, and there's no way in hell that you are going to be bailed out of any of them. Although you don't care about your grades, you don't look forward to spending extra days in school doing the final exams.

"Hey, Strider. That was quite a good jump you did just there."

You look up for confirmation before standing up and leaving without a word.

 

An hour later, you are sitting in a painfully plain and respectable classroom. The teacher hands you your copy of The Canterbury Tales and you start drawing the newest additions to your collection of preserved things in the margins as she drawls out all the hidden connotations in The Scarlet Letter to the rest of the class. She risks asking you a question on Hawthorne, fear quite apparent in her light blue eyes, and you answer it in a bored manner, earning applause and five minutes' worth of gossip from the students two tables away.

Truth is, you like the class. The teacher is intimidated enough by your aura and reputation to let you get your way and insightful enough to semi-secretly give you advanced materials every single day. She knows you live on words and only need to look at a poem once; she also knows that it's good for everyone to just leave you alone. You've heard that she freaked out when she first graded one of your doodled papers.

Having learned so much about the Physician and the Pardoner that you decide to only use them for ironic purposes in a future dreaded conversation with Egbert, you let your eyes wander. You probably should have taken the AP English Literature Exam and failed it ironically, but all that money is truly better off stacked away in your fund for a new turntable. You have taken up a part time job in a bar for the same purpose and you're determined to get it before the end of June.

The bell rings.

You swing that bag – no, that swag – of yours over your head and stride out of the classroom, your mind already begging for school to end already. You know that public school is your best option and you should know a bit of everything, Newton's laws and quadratic functions included, but learning is uncool by definition and you don't have any other reasons to be here.

(You don't have any friends.)

There are, though, at least fifteen stalkers the last time you counted. Most of them are girls – high heels-wearing, makeup-heavy girls who happen to have an unfortunate amount of confidence in their inherent attractiveness. They see your eyes as a wondrous mystery, and the fact that you mix ill beats only make them even more determined to get their lips on yours. While most of them have been sane enough to not approach you personally, you have been forced to handle two or three face-to-face.

(Those scenarios didn't go so well.)

As you stroll along, you spy three of them in the chemistry corridor and change course, leaving through one of the exits. You don't want to waste time dealing with them – with your parkour skills, it is much easier to travel most of the distance outside the school before entering through another entrance.

"Dave."

You ignore the voice – it's so low, you're not even sure you, a DJ, has heard it – and run on.

"Dave." The voice is stronger now, more urgent. "Dave... don't go."

...

You freeze to a stop, surprised by the familiarity and tone of the voice.

"Dave." You know who it is now, and that doesn't make the situation any clearer. "Dave, it's me."

You turn towards her, hiding an expression of pleasant surprise behind a poker face that only indicates a boy full of questions. She's in a white T-shirt and mid-length pants, her face pale and her hair a dark, wild disarray in the wind. She smiles weakly and starts walking towards you as she realizes that you have recognized her. You notice, with a fair amount of shock, that she has lost weight; she is also keeping her head down. Her slender fingers are crossed together.

"Dave," she says. "Can you help me to enroll? I'll be staying in Houston for a while."

The tardy bell rings inside the building, but you are only staring at her. Her eyes, those dark green eyes, they appear lost... afraid, but determined. She is gripping her bag tightly, so tightly that you can feel the nervous energy that's radiating out of Jade.

 _Why did I assume?_

"Let's get you enrolled," you say, and you lead the way because you don't feel like you can look at her in the face again.


	2. Observation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jade and how she spent three years reliving the same memories.
> 
> Also Dave/Jade.

Three years ago, Karkat Vantas had died just ten feet away from her.

 

They had beaten the game in an unorthodox manner; they had saved the world, and that should have been good enough. They were but thirteen years old, though, and they had made some friends they could not forget: they had lost, and they had lost so much that she sometimes thought that any other outcome would have been better.

She had been tossed back to her island, and although she had pestered her three dear human friends to tell them that she was okay, she truly wasn't. She was alone in the middle of a vast empty ocean, and although it didn't bother her before the Game, it did then. There was no Bec, no statue of her Grandpa, no Dave no John no Rose – not even Jadesprite. She could have used her own company, however whiny she might have turned out to be. She would, at least, understand the pain in losing some dear friends before being forced to live in stone cold reality again.

She sat and looked up at the frog temple, at the symbolism of the Game that had made her gain and lose so much in one single long day. The emptiness and a cold – a cold of the heart, not of the island – had gradually crept in, and after a while she ceased to care. A void was okay, she could live in an abyss, she was supposed to build a new world anyway and populate it with the things she loved the most.

She was supposed to be able to do this. She had to do this. Somehow. Someday.

In days, she had the foundation of a brand new world in which Karkat Vantas lived on in absolutely everything.

 

He was supposed to be here. That tree was him, that flower was him, that stone was him, he was supposed to be them dammit. He was everything, because then he surrounded her and she needed that. He needed that, in order to exist on in some shape or form. It should have been that way, anyway – he should have been here, on Earth. He had created all this with his fucking leadership and all this should naturally be him.

She named them (him) too, past Karkat, paster Karkat, current Karkat, future Karkat and after!critical event Karkat, bad Karkat, good Karkat, exasperating Karkat, cute Karkat, all the Karkats, all of them, and she talked to him on the silvery beach, writing CG/GG pesterlogs on the sand before the next tide swept them away. He still yelled in his usual way, he still wrote in all caps, he still refused to do pranks and it was just as him as she could get.

She also knew in some hollow space of her heart, though, that it was not the same. It was not the same, she could never mimic him exactly, and those Karkats – they would not yell back at her and have fuckass shouting matches and they wouldn't comfort her, either, they just had eyes that she labeled as his and life that she wished he still has.

She didn't know if she loved him; she didn't know what love was, but she did know that she really cared about him and this was different from the time her Grandpa died. Far, far worse, and sometimes she didn't know why it was that way – it just was. When Karkat – his ghost? His memory? – called to her in the night, she would wake up to a sky of stars, her tears blurring out the constellation of Cancer, shining brightly in the night sky, the only thing she had of him.

During that fateful minute, three years ago, he had thrown her backwards, and as it seemed like the crucial life-saving transportalizer wasn't working, the expression on his face had been one of utter terror. It worked, it worked in the end, her life was his best and last gift to her, but she had to watch as he died and his body was disintegrated into Alternian atoms, fated to drift forever in the incipisphere – a space that was never a universe.

She hated herself for telling past him to drop dead and go to hell. Sure, it was past him and past him did die, in a way, at the hands of Bec Noir, but she had still told him that and she couldn't shake that feeling away from her mind. She screamed to the skies, she screamed to the empty forests and she screamed at every single Karkat she made that she was sorry. Her Karkats couldn't answer her, they were wood and marine and air, so she screamed louder until her throat burnt out and she sat back and fell numbly into sleep.

Sometimes, she wondered if it was a bad thing that he had not died in her arms. He probably wouldn't have, and she wasn't fast enough anyway, but she wasn't there to give him physical comfort and she'll never know how his alien goddamned lousy stupid skin felt like. She never touched him, not ever, and he was a friend. She never would, for his body was obliterated by Bec Noir all over again and this time there was no way back.

She knew it wasn't her fault, not really, but she couldn't forget him. He lived only in her memory now, right? The world was his, but everybody only saw the legacy, not a six sweeps old nubby horned foulmouth who had helped to create it in the first place.

After a long day, she would sit back under the silvery moon, her back to the sea, the beats of the waves helping her to think rationally just a little. She would reach out for one of her computers and start typing dazedly. She wanted to forget but she couldn't, she wanted to get in touch with people who could comfort her but at the same time they reminded her of him and their losses and it was just too much. She wondered if Dave felt the same way, for in the pesterlogs she had with Rose and Dave she gained the dim perception that he and Terezi were a thing, but Dave was probably too cool to let it affect him or just too cool to let it show. She never brought it up, in any case, and neither did he.

It didn't take John all that long to figure out. Oh, John. John, who noticed enough in her forced words to ask her to live with him and Rose in Washington. John, who always had the best intentions, and who coaxed a still reality-escaping Rose into also doing it. They didn't ask Dave, though, apparently, and for weeks she would be woken up by the eerie sounds the computer made thousands of miles away from a decent-sized center of civilization, rubbing her eyes to discern the two speech bubbles in the air.

John insisted. He made it lighthearted and he probably was happy enough, because unlike her, John seemed to always see the silver lining on that grey cloud and he didn't lose anyone. (Being around the heroes of light probably gave him all the luck, all of it, while she hung around Knights and Pages in Sour Armor and started smelling like a lemon herself.) Vriska was gone, true, but she was alive and she bade farewell to him and she was probably having the time of her life as a flying orange on the vast Alternian seas with a badass Kanaya by her side, just like she promised John she would. She had written notes for him to be opened every year, and although she could tell that John loved them, she could also tell that he was sometimes nostalgic and wary of talking about the notes with her.

She had rejected their offer repeatedly: she couldn't leave her Karkats behind, and the island was the one thing that belonged to her and her alone. (Her Guardian was gone, her dog was gone – what else did she have?) When they turned up in a huge expensive yacht and "dropped by", though, they practically abducted her away - took her away when she was still dressed in her morning rags. John kept telling her that he's sorry, his dad kept telling her that it would all be okay, Rose's mom was talking about some legal stuff and Rose was eyeing her huge Karkat collection, taking photos with her sophisticated violet phone and writing down notes on her psychoanalysis notebook when she thought the green eyed girl wasn't looking.

She was mad at Rose and John for about a week before resolving to just transform her room in the newly reconstructed Egbert/Lalonde estate into her new island. Now Past Karkat was no longer the palm tree, he was the green lamp that John bought for her.

She was grateful that Rose didn't take her to psychiatrists or try to hold psychoanalysis sessions with her, but she was sure that she talked about it with John behind her back. They filled her room with physics shenanigans, insightful enough to not buy her any squiddles that might remind her of her loss. The weeks before school, she poured herself into those books, drawing Feynman Diagrams until her head started spinning and she had to come down to eat dinner with the one big family.

John said she would be a part of their happy family. Of course, he said, for she was his sister and now Rose was also his stepsister. Rose's mom, being the genius and beauty that she was, had sorted everything out and Jade was to enroll in school as Jade Harley-Egbert, the long lost twin sister of John Egbert. She smiled radiantly and said "that's awesome" before she realized that she had overdone it and Rose was looking at her carefully while John had a giant guilty look on his face and swallowed visibly, wanting to talk to her about Sburb and letting her know that he cared although he knew better.

She didn't feel like she belonged. John and Rose had drifted towards each other and she thought it was a good thing, for she knew they also had leftover inner demons from the Game, Rose especially. She could see Rose's deliberately subtle efforts to make up with her mother - Rose HAD to do that after her mother came back from death, although she didn't want Jade to see it - and it hurt. She had Mom, John had Dad, even Dave had his Bro, and she was... just all alone, because Bec had practically died when she prototyped him with herself. She smiled and grinned and watched her favorite cartoons and TV shows with John's family, but she frankly failed at really enjoying them and they knew it.

When school started, it didn't get that much better. She owned all the sciences to the point that Rose's Mom made Rose's special Harvard graduate tutor also teach her, but she was cool with many other classes. The only time she didn't fall asleep in an American History class was the time they went over Revolutionary era weaponry and apothecaries.

Thing was, John and Rose expected her misery to pass away with time. Or hoped, anyway, for they didn't truly have a good solution. John's friends had embraced her enthusiastically the first time they met but eventually withdrew one by one after they found out that she was some sort of math-science savant who was far more prone to staring off into the distance than her brother and constantly drew aliens with strange orangey horns on her notepad. Rose's friends... well, they kept to themselves, just like her. They were the noble circle of smartsecretives and she usually only heard about them when the school giddily announced that they won writing scholarships to Columbia. Freshman year, sophomore year… it was getting routine for her, and she knew that they feared to see her condition become something routine. They had wanted to infect her with their brand of recovered sunshine and relaxation, the rightful award to saving an entire world, but she stayed away, afraid and not deeming herself to be worthy.

She didn't know when John and Rose started giving up. Maybe they also became exhausted with the passage of time, less confident and more understanding. She had seen some of Rose's award winning writings throughout the years (found accidentally by a strangely excited John), and they were full of hidden and subtle allusions to a planet of stretching multicolored seas and the shadow of a missing light-craving romantic. John had looked resigned when they reached the end, and he had not spoken of the incident with either of them since.

John and Rose took her to playgrounds, to parks, to video game shops, to cinemas and to beaches; John had taken her to a ride in Yellowstone and Rose – ROSE – had ran with her the day they became high school sophomores. They tried his best to cheer her up, and she was happy, sometimes, fleeting sometimes. She sincerely loved John and Rose, loved the new life that they had found or created for themselves, but she just wasn't a part of it. A part of her had died with Karkat – or, maybe, that fucker had simply gone in and changed the chemical composition of her future. Her future could not be normal, could not be lovey-dovey, it could only be heavy and she was clinging on to that heaviness for dear life (or, truly, Karkat's continued spiritual existence in her mind).

 

The night they went to talk to her, it was raining. She was staring out of the window and counting stars when they came in, their faces concerned and wary. They told her that maybe she should spend a summer, or the rest of her high school years, if it should work out that way, with Dave; she hadn't seen him for real since the game, anyway, and they could drop by anytime to pick her up if shit gets too hot to handle. Why not, Jade? C'mon, you've passed all the exams you care about with flying colors, and Dave should be also done in a week or two. We're giving you the express pass to the one and only coolkid here. Dave doesn't take too many visitors, he's federally too cool for that, so you get to go because we love you. C'mon, Jade. We've already bought plane tickets for you and THEY ARE EXPENSIVE –

She wasn't about to say no, not really. She knew that they were doing this for her, and not for themselves. Her life had turned into a nice round ball, she was just sort of quietly living through it, having learned how to drift through in mainland American life passively, and she had nothing against being pushed around – she had just wanted to keep Karkat alive in her memory.

She just didn't know what to expect with Dave.

 

He had gotten around one octave quieter since the Game.

It wasn't hard, really, to see. She had noted that similarity between them, and that was one of the reasons why she thought perhaps Dave also stayed up at night, just staring at the stars, trying to find Libra with the eyes he hid behind Ben Stiller shades. He still had all the irony and all the cool and just all the Dave Strider package, it was just that the way he used it became a little… off.

It frightened her, just a little, to realize that even the coolkid's cool could become fractured. Talking with Karkat had shown her the tiny holes that usually go around unnoticed in a Knight's façade and Dave's words seem to contain a lot of them.

They pestered each other throughout the three years; sporadically, spontaneously, always with the element of surprise. She still requested furry ironic drawings from him, and he still continuously asked her for recordings of her bass sessions. He tutored her on subordinate clauses once or twice, and she once spent an entire night trying to teach him the concept of Fermions so that he could integrate it into his music sincerely (she meant ironically).

She wondered if he had a defense mechanism, because surely, his must be better than hers. He was the coolkid, and coolkids knew everything. Rose and John didn't go to Houston to "rescue" him, in any case, and Bro was either too cool or have no reason (probably both) to phone up Mom and say that their ectobiological son was depressed or bipolar or something, she didn't study for that one psychology quiz. Rose seemed to be satisfied enough with the psychological state of her ectobiological brother, and John mentioned him frequently enough. Dave Strider was still a regular topic, although there was a certain type of tension around that name.

She didn't know. Just didn't know, for she knew that she idolized Dave (albeit with good reason) and he was a mystery in any case. Her intuition and experience told her a few probable things, but a scientist without precognition never concludes before going through the empirical process. Anyhow, Rose and John had both understood him better than her, and she hoped that they had told him or Bro about her going to Houston. She wasn't about to ask.

 

Dave had enrolled her easily. He has another two weeks before summer, but he has persuaded the admissions to enroll her before the end of the school year. She wouldn't be going to school, but for the time being, she's here to stay.

She doesn't know what made her ask him to enroll her. Houston's not really her type of city – it's noisy, dirty, urban and hot, and it gets unbearable during summer, when the temperature can easily soar to a hundred degrees while the smog would become so thick in parts of the city that the hospitals are regularly flooded by asthma patients. Plants do not prosper in downtown Houston – although she has seen parks and central greens, they look unhealthy. Dreadfully unhealthy.

It's probably the thing she saw in Dave's eyes, inches behind his cool shades.

She spends the school day in the library (Houston libraries are good, they have NASA stuff and the librarians even gave her a discount voucher for the next exhibition) and he picks her up after school, saying with the minimal bit of an apologetic tone that he doesn't drive home or use mass transit so they would have to walk for around a mile. She doesn't mind and just trots after him, for he seems to walk awfully fast and his actions sort of scream _let's just fucking get out of here as soon as possible._

She understands why when one of the girls on a passing school bus gives her a perfect Karlie Kloss death stare. High fashion: beautiful and deadly.

Dave relaxes a little when they are a half mile out and walking next to a decently sized street, but his walk is still awkward and she suspects that he's simply not used to walking slowly. "Dave… are you sure this is going to be okay with your Bro?"

"Don't worry about it," he says quickly, his voice controlled and again, a little different from the voice she remembers from the Game due to the age difference. It's still entirely clean of Texas, however, something she knows he's doing for her. "Bro and I run on different wavelengths nowadays."

"John and Rose… really didn't tell you?"

He turns and shakes his head, and Jade doesn't know whether to be worried or relieved.

 

Dave decides to get a mattress, grab a pillow and sleep on the floor while she gets the bed; she tries to not think too far into the fact that she's going to be the only female in the (honestly) rather small apartment for several months, maybe even more than a year. Having picked up subtle references to the Libra girl all over in Dave's room and made a mental note to explore them as discreetly as possible tomorrow, she is now feeling a little overwhelmed by the very real and ready-to-be-sensed scenes in all the apartment rooms, with all the rad and (honestly dangerous) ninja swords, all the music equipment and all the…

"Had to restock some of those," Dave says as if he knows what she's thinking. He's leaning on the wall and playing God knows what (ohgodwhat remix, she thinks to herself) on his iPhone 4, his face obscured by his blond hair.

Ah. Although the Game had, for some strange reason, left the world quite intact, some of the stuff it deems more trivial has not been recovered. She had had to fill up her botanical collection again – Johnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn – and apparently, for Dave, it's the smuppets.

Oh, Dave. You've done that for Bro, haven't you? One never knows the value of a cherished one until he is lost…

She winces ever so slightly.

 

She wakes up two hours before dawn. It's not the middle of the night, for the Striders stay up later than what's truly sustainable and play ill beats even when they are drifting to sleep. For a second she thinks she's back at her island, what with the warmth and the humidity, but when she forces herself to open her eyes, she sees the thin green quilt as well as the blurry outline of one of Dave's speakers and she remembers everything.

The curious thing is that Dave is not asleep on his mattress.

She flinches, thinking he could be once again involved in a midnight fight to the death with his Bro, but when she puts on her glasses, gets off and stops at the door, she sees that Bro is sound asleep on his futon, his pose too cool even in slumber.

She doesn't know whether or laugh or to cry, whether this is an ironic situation or not, whether she should just go back to sleep or risk it and find out everything.

 _Oh, alright, Dave, this is the moment of truth then._

Feeling the moment of impulsivity, she drags herself across the room and opens the door. It is pitch dark, but sheer darkness is far from frightening now – she has seen worse things, things not meant for sentient eyes. The concrete is pleasantly cool to her bare feet as she starts ascending the stairs; why Dave would need stairs – extremely perilous stairs – to get to the roof is beyond her comprehension. It's probably another of those pranks Bro pulls on Dave.

Two minutes later, she's at the top. She takes several seconds to merge herself into the shadows before she realizes that it's not necessary – she can see him, but he can't see her. If he senses that she is there, Dave doesn't move or acknowledge it.

He sits near the edge of the building, his eyes cast skyward. There are next to no stars in the sky tonight; it is only a dull orange, the result of the wonderful light pollution. He's in his nightshirt, and it's now even more painfully obvious to her that he has "stretched out" since the Game – he's taller, skinnier and just… stretched out. He still has exercise muscles – if anything, those muscles are leaner than they were before – and he towers over her in height. She sees something in his pose, though, that reminds her of herself, of the nights she spent just wanting to be alone and to think of everything that has ever happened, craving, more than anything, to forget but horrified at the possibility.

It's a type of loneliness associated with not really being able to let go of the past, a wound that is too painful to heal and one that should never have been inflicted.

She wants to reach out, to call his name and say that she understands. She wants to talk to him about Karkat and Terezi, about Bec Noir and how their lives were thrown into the air casually by forces they could not control and put under a microscope for the scrutiny of destiny. She wants to hug him, to cry on his shoulder, to ask questions she already knows answers to, to make sure that she has gotten it right.

If anyone should be able to understand, it should be him.

 

Instead, she turns away as quietly as she could and walks back down without a word, her buckteeth biting down on her lips so hard that she could smell blood.


	3. Frustration

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dave is trying to get through his first full day of having Jade living under his roof.
> 
> He also gets bitter and does some parkour.

No matter how little sleep you get, you can't wake up late.

On a fine Houstonian morning, two years ago, you knelt down on the concrete and scratched the words "FIVE A.M." onto the surface with a sharp stone. You had written "FIVE A.M." everywhere; on updates of SBaHJ, on your English papers, on the labels of your self-made photographs, on your wall and on the window of Bro's car. You had to remind yourself constantly; had to keep yourself functioning, had to let it steam off.

You had to run, and you have to keep going because you don't see another way out.

When you open your eyes, you know it is 10 minutes and 23 seconds to 5:00 am. The sky is still dark and only a few rays of light has made it into your room, lighting the pieces of music related shit up haphazardly and giving awkwardly shaped shadows to your wires. You randomly grab a shirt – shit, if you see another Game Bro shirt tomorrow you are going to seriously flip the fuck out – and put it on quietly, wincing a little as you twist your arm the wrong way and it hurts again. Fuck – no rolls today, then. Vaults, maybe; you suspect that you're just going to end up working on your simple jumps. Go to that other place, maybe. You don't want to run into the Tranquility Park crowd again.

You steal a glance at Jade; she's still asleep on your mattress, her dark, slightly curly hair sprayed all over your pillow. She still has her glasses on, and that is just so ridiculously cute that you have to spare a smile. Picking up the algebra assignment you have staunchly refused to do, you scrawl a note for her on the back and leave it on the table, sure that she will find it and annoy Bro later instead of going after you for whatever reason.

You'll talk to Egbert later. You'll pester him when he finally gets his sleepy ass off his bed, sure that this will just be another nice normal day to hang out with Lalonde and watch his shitty movies. You don't know why John has sent a skinny and silent Jade to you without an explanation beforehand, and you don't really want to find out.

 

 _Ten minutes_

You let go and feel the way your entire being collides with the air, your arms stretched out as if to grasp something you cannot even reach, eventually completing a fucking pirouette off the handle before you land gracefully on the curb, only three feet away from a screeching car

 _Twenty minutes and thirty five seconds_

The wall bows down to you, its height no obstacle to a strider on his way, and that's not enough as you look down from a thirty feet tall construction project and smirk at the ordinary runners below

 _Twenty six minutes and two seconds_

You like it as snapshots of the city disappear behind you, as if you are a part of the story it never tells, you are Houstonian and running and there's a sign ahead and that's all that matters for now

 _Forty five minutes and forty six seconds_

It's about rising as the sun does, it's about perceiving a new road the ordinary cannot see, it's about taking to the air and trusting in your abilities – in Egbertian and Lalondian it's probably called a fucking _leap of faith_

 _Fifty one minutes and sixteen seconds_

You've seen more than you should, you've been forced to grow up when other kids have been tucked safely away in their homes, you've smelled death and handled the laws of physics and you know more about the rules of this world than every other fucking person on this street, but no you're just running and you're not looking at them and you're throwing those fragments of knowledge behind –

 _Fifty nine minutes and fifty seconds_

You stop, cradling your left arm a little as the aching is getting on your nerves. You stare up at the broken door of your apartment building and sigh, your heart full of an identifiable and familiar shade of bitterness. You want to bury it, to hide it, to never even bring it up again but it always happens in the end and you can only run away for so long

And then Doc Steel is playing. Loudly. You wonder, not for the first time, why you didn't take it off your playlist.

"You win, Terezi. I still can't forget you."

You don't actually say it aloud. The stopwatch in your head hits sixty minutes and you stagger into the building, your mind already turned to think about the upcoming statistics test.

 _Damn school_. Thinking about it always turns your ongoing thought stream off – probably because it's depressing and absolutely useless. Changing the subject in your head during emergencies is probably the only good thing it can ever do.

 

You can't help but stifle a grin when you walk into the kitchen. Jade, in a green, casual T-shirt, is up and about, her eyes bright with the "wrong" type of light you remember from yesterday and Bro is just standing in a corner, scowling, his eyebrows pinched together.

Since no one in the Strider household can flashstep now, the room is just one big mess.

"Hi, Dave!" she says enthusiastically, dancing around in the kitchen, seemingly totally unaware of the traps and dangers that are making Bro wince and frown. "Where have you been?"

"Chasing down criminals on the I-10," you hear yourself say. "Peter Parker has posted a special surrender issue in New York. Now Jade, can you get off that pile of smuppets? I'm pretty sure there are two swords down there."

She pouts and turns to stand at a safer place. Goddamn it, she's sixteen and likely pretending but when she pouts she still looks exactly the same.

"Jade, do you want to go to school with Dave?" Bro asks, his voice amiable above what must be a swirling tornado of utter disgust. The Strider and Harley lifestyles are not supposed to mix. Like ever.

She pulls a face. "I can't, I have to unpack my stuff." Although the unusual answer throws you off even more, you still let go of the breath you've been holding; if she sensed it, she doesn't say anything. "Dave borrowed some books for me, anyway."

"Miss Harley, you must not touch my computer. Ever." You almost choke on the water you are gulping down because Bro is trying hilariously to maintain his dignity while lecturing Jade in a tone he thinks even a derp kid can understand. Well, well. Way for Jade to turn on her… "charm". Or perhaps, you think as you look up at Bro critically behind your shades, just her derpiness. That hasn't exactly all gone away – at least she can still pretend and pretend well.

"Yessir," Jade sings, and Bro grimaces as she exits the kitchen, stepping on a smuppet as she goes.

 

|PESTERLOG|  
\-- turntechGodhead [TG] began pestering ectoBiologist [EB] --  
TG: hey  
TG: so what the fuck is wrong with jade  
TG: is it vantas  
EB: hi dave! uh…  
EB: actually, yeah.  
EB: she's not happy, living with us.  
EB: i mean, sometimes she is but mostly she just stares out and goes into her shell of makebelieve.  
TG: makebelieve  
TG: as in what  
EB: dave, do you really want me to talk about it?  
TG: what  
TG: what makes you think i wont talk about it  
TG: i even talk about bill murray dressed up as americas next top model now dude come on  
EB: fine.  
EB: she names her stuff after karkat and thinks that he's still alive because of that.  
EB: according to rose, she's been doing that ever since he died.

For a second, you don't know what to say.

TG: …  
EB: well yeah  
EB: rose and i have been trying to cheer her up but it doesn't seem to work  
EB: i swear rose hasn't been psychoanalyzing her, she's been supportive  
TG: why didnt you tell me though  
EB: i dunno, it feels right.  
EB: and i know you wouldn't let jade starve on the street anyway.  
TG: alright my fucking school bells off  
TG: later  
EB: good luck dave!

You walk into history numbly and sit down, hard, on your seat. The teacher glares at you with hard eyes but you remain oblivious. Taking out a piece of scratch paper without turning her way, you start another sketch of hella jeff.

You had suspected as much. And…

You know John. Even though the guy seems to get everything through luck and guidance alone, he works hard for the things he believes in. And Rose… well, she's Rose.

The face of hella jeff is coming together nicely; it's not shitty at all and in a moment of frustration, you throw the pen under the table. The teacher's still droning on and on about the Fall of the Berlin Wall but you're not listening, because you know what the situation means and you don't like it.

You were the Knight. You would still be her Knight, but you don't know whether or not she will listen to you. Would you succeed where the Heir and the Seer have failed? Do you even want to be more reminded of what has happened in that goddamned game?

You press your head against the table and wish that everything would just end.


End file.
